How To Create and Launch Series Templates

Hello everybody. My name is Drew and today we're going to talk about how you can make series templates. And so series are how you can tie together a a series of communications that are multiple steps and then you just automate them to trigger one after the other. So for instance, uh if you're looking to create a drip campaign or a sales automation or a marketing automation, a nurturing sequence, things along those lines, series templates are how you can create that. And these can be sent to individual contacts as well as to entire contact lists. They can be triggered manually and they can also be triggered automatically. So, there's a lot of flexibility here. Um, and so let's dive right into how to create this. Now um a couple of basics that I want to touch on here as well is um first of all the biggest step in my opinion in creating one of these kinds of automations is the just the conceptual part of it. So um the first thing is just to know what you're what you're looking to send.

Figure out what those steps are going to be. If they involve uh email steps, you're going to need to create those email templates. If they involve text steps, you're going to need to create those text templates. These can also involve tasks that will prompt you or your users to say pick up the phone and call somebody. And all of this can get woven together. So, your series can be pure email, pure text, pure tasks, or any combination of those. Um, and so if you're going to be doing email templates, you're going to need to go into that communication tab in your account and go to emails templates and create any of those email templates that you're going to need for your series. Like you can see right here, we've got a folder for a nurturing series. And I encourage doing that, you know, using a folder, putting all the templates into that folder, and clearly titling them so it's really easy to see based on that on that email template title what step they're going to be.

For instance, same goes for your texts. Again, under communication, you click on text, you click on templates, and you can then create any of those templates that you might need. The tasks get created at the time of making your series template. So, that's actually not something that you do in preparation of creating your series template. So now, uh, let's just say in this example, we've already got the email templates and the text templates that we're going to need. Now, it's time to make the series templates. So, you're going to create your series template. Under the automation tab, you click on that and there's that series button. In this table, we'll see any series templates that already exist. But in this case, we're going to click on that green create button to create a new one. You can give it a title. And then now we've got this button right down here, add first step. We're going to click on that. And then this this modal that opens up, you can just work from the top down.

So in this case, this first step is going to automatically just trigger as soon as the template is launched. So there's nothing to do there. Under step action, you click on the dropdown, and we have a few options here. Send a new email, send a new set a task due, send a text, or trigger a Zapier zap. We're not going to go into Zap year too much because most users are don't use this, but you are able to have a step that will uh send an it'll create an action for Zapier to do something that's outside of Viploud. Most people are using these top three here. So, we can in this case hit send a new email. You click on the drop down below and you're able to choose the email template that you want to have sent. Down below here, we've got advanced step settings. And what these can do is change a custom contact field when the step is completed on that contact record that is receiving this message. And also you can have if the contact replies have things happen such as cancel the following steps.

So if you want your series to stop automatically when somebody replies to this particular email, you can check that right there. Also you can have tasks created and also have your contact fields updated based on somebody responding to this message. Something I want to point out here too is that you've got this option right here again for stopping the series when people reply to this email. You've also got over here uh if you look in the left side where I've got the mouse there's a box right there that says cancel unprocessed steps for contacts if any inbound email. Sometimes people get a little tripped up on the difference here. And the difference is that the one here that says if contact replies, that is just to if they reply to this email. So in other words, if they just send you an email that's unrelated and it's not in reply to the message that was sent from this particular step. Well, if if if you only have this box checked right here, it will not stop the series if they send an unrelated email.

But if you check the box that says cancel and process steps for any inbound email, well then that's going to mean like blanket. If they send any kind of message to you, it'll stop the series. So, we're going to hit okay to create this step. Then there's that green button that says add another step. This is how we can add an additional step here. So now we have some timing settings that are uh that are presented to us. So this is days delay after prior steps. So if we're going to say one email, that means that this is going to send on the second day of your uh of this automation. And then time to process is going to be what time of that day do you want this to be sent? You got a check box here for only process step on weekday. So what that means if if you check that and this step lands on a weekend day, it's effectively going to pause the rest of this series until Monday.

And then the logic of all the subsequent steps is going to follow accordingly a few days later now that the whole series has paused. And then down below here, we got step action. Everything here is the same except we've got a send a reply email. So, what that's going to do is it's going to um it's going to add a like a regarding attribute to the subject line, like an RE colon to the subject line of this email that you choose to send right here. and it's going to quote a previous message underneath it. Whenever you use something like this, I highly recommend then using the send test to yourself option so that you can make sure that especially these reply email steps are all formatted the way that you expect them to be. and then advanced step settings. All right, here are exactly the same as they were for our first step. We're going to add another step here. And so each time we see this days delay after prior step, it is going to be how many like we're working on step three right now.

This is going to then be how many days do we want this to pause after step two. So, it's always in relation to the previous step. And so, I'm going to skip over doing a send text because that works exactly the same as a an email, but set task due. When we select that, we then get some options that open up here. We're going to create a task. Um, this is going to be a like a a task template basically. And so you can give it a subject line. This is going to be what appears in your tasks. Uh so you want it to be kind of clear. Uh you're going to be designing this to be really clear for you so you know what this task is in relation to. You're also able to use merge tags in these. So you can see right here, insert merge tag under the details. So this is really useful especially if you have a sales team and you want them to basically have a script that will appear to them.

When you use these merge tags you will actually merge in the information of the contact that this task is related to. You're also of course able to set the due date days after creation that'll be set here and also you can set the task owner for this. So, it's actually possible to have a series that would be launched by say me, but maybe I want a task in this series to be related to another user. Well, you are actually able to set this to be related to another person. So, kind of useful for like a almost project management kind of scenario. Um, and then really most of the rest of this works just like tasks normally do in the system. But one thing that people do often wonder about how tasks work in series is what happens with the timing of all of this. It's like what happens if I have a task step on, you know, day three of the automation, but on day four I have an email that's going to be going out automatically. And what if the person who whose task is assigned to them, what if they're kind of slow on it for for one reason or another?

Well, the the series is going to stop when um it's basically going to pause until the task is completed. So if a task is assigned to somebody and it's a long weekend or something like that, um you don't have to worry about the rest of the series continuing and going haywire. It is going to wait for the task to be completed and then the subsequent steps will proceed accordingly. All right. Um, another thing here is if you have a um if you have a a a text step in your series and you hit this send test to yourself button. Well, first of all, what this is what this does is it just sends everything to you that is in your uh in your series. And so uh text steps will actually be emailed to you though. So everything's going to land into your inbox into your email inbox and you'll be able to see the formatting of how all the communication would be would be sent. So that's the primary use of it is just be able to make sure that everything is landing and formatted the way that you want it to uh without having to say send yourself a two week series and then actually have to wait two weeks for the whole thing to play out.

So you do not need to wait So, uh, a couple of other buttons here that I want to touch on. Uh, now actually, of course, you can see right here, um, if you choose this, uh, this task due, um, you do want to remember this right here. So if you are sending a series to a 500 person contact list and you have a task due as a as a step you need to reme remember that these tasks are going to be created for every single contact. So in that case when that step appears it's going to create literally 500 tasks for you um which you probably don't want to do. So, in most cases, if you're going to be using a task as a step in in a series, you need it to be a either a single contact series or just a manageable number like maybe 10 at a time or something like that. So, you need to make sure that it's going to be manageable to complete those tasks in a timely manner. and a couple of other options right here.

under this setup uh square right here, we've got uh cancel unprocessed steps for contacts if a recipient has joined a suite. So, if you use our community add-on and you have suites, kind of like social groups, you can have a series that uh can be launched to invite somebody into your suite and it'll cancel automatically when somebody has joined your suite. And additionally, you've got an option for cancel unprocessed steps for contacts if recipient booked a meeting on a scheduleuler. So you check on you check that you choose your Viploud scheduler and this series can be used to remind people to join uh to book a time on your calendar and then it will stop reminding them once they have uh booked that meeting. So it's really really handy for scheduling meetings or rescheduling meetings if somebody has missed that meeting originally. So, um I believe that pretty much finishes how to create these series. Now, how do we launch them? Like I said, you're able to launch them in a number of ways, including sending to an individual contact.

So, let's take a look at how we do that. So, first of all, since we're looking at the series table right here, you're able to you got a bunch of options just right here. So, I'm hovering over my series. There's that send button right there. I can click on that and I've got an option to send a contact or send a contact list. And we can also just do it directly from a contacts page. So, we're going to go to a contact and you've got this more button right here in the upper right corner. You click on that more button and then there's a launch series button that that like that's right there. Additionally, you've got your series card on the contact record with a plus button on it, too. You can just hit that plus button and then you can hit choose series template, choose your series, hit the preview series button. This lets you preview the series. You can actually make last minute changes to it. And then from here you can either start the series now, you can schedule it for the future.

and that's how you are able to send these. So actually I'm going to in this case start this series now because I also want to show you how you can stop a series for a particular contact. So this is from the contact record which I think is the easiest way when you already know who the contact is that you want it to stop for. We can look at the series card and we can see that we've got a series in progress for this person. So, if you hit the three dots all the way to the right on that card in the row of the series you want to stop, then there's a cancel series to contact button right there. So, confirm, delete, and we have stopped our series. So, we've already seen from the series table how to send to a contact list, but another easy way to launch a series to a list of people is from the plus button in the upper right corner of your of the taskbar. So you hit that plus button right there. There's a series square you can click on. And from here we can choose whether we want it go go to a contact or to a contact list. You can select contact list. Choose the list that you want to send to. Choose the template that you want to send. And then there's a preview series button that takes you to basically the same uh the same screen that we were looking at earlier, except now because we're sending to a group of people, we're also able to choose whether we want the email portions of this to be sent as a batch send or an advanced mass email. All right. Well, I think that pretty much covers it so I hope you found this helpful series are really some powerful stuff and yeah, reach out to us if we can help with anything. Thank you so much.